[10]. As far as our present knowledge goes, religion appears to be universal among men. There is no community of which we can say with certainty that it is without religion. There are some doubtful cases—for example, certain Australian tribes reported on by Spencer and Gillen, among whom it is difficult to discover any definite religious feeling: they offer no sacrifices or petitions, and appear to recognize no personal relations with any supernatural Power, beyond the belief that the spirits of the dead are active in their midst, causing sickness, death, and birth; nor is there any sign that they have lost earlier more definite beliefs.[11] Yet they have solemn ceremonies in which human blood plays a great part, and these may have reference to the intervention of supernatural beings, the term "supernatural" being taken as expressing any mysterious fact lying outside of the common course of things. A mysterious being called Twan is spoken of in initiation ceremonies, chiefly, it seems, to frighten or train the boys. Is there an indication that the tribal leaders have risen above the popular belief in such a being? Experience shows that it is difficult for civilized men to get at the religious ideas of savages; and it is possible, in spite of the careful investigations thus far made, that the last word on Central Australian beliefs has not yet been spoken. A similar reserve must be exercised in regard to reports of certain other tribes, whose ceremonies and institutions have appeared to some European and American observers to be without a religious element.[12]
[11]. There is at present no satisfactory historical evidence (whatever psychological ground there may be, or whatever deduction from the theory of evolution may seem necessary) of the existence of a subreligious stage of human life—a stage in which there is only a vague sense of some extrahuman power affecting man's interests, without definition of the power, and without attempt to enter into social relations with it.[13]
[12]. True, in the great mass of existing savage humanity we find social and religious customs so definite that we are forced to suppose a long preceding period of development. It has even been held that traces of religious conceptions are discernible in the first surviving records of "prehistoric" man, the contemporary of the cave bear—a period separated from the earliest clear historical records by many millenniums;[14] but, though the existence of such conceptions is by no means improbable, the alleged traces are too dim to build a theory on. The supposition of a continuous religious development from the earliest times is in accord with all that we know of human history, but, until more facts come to light, it will be prudent to reserve opinion as to the character of prehistoric religion.[15]
[13]. In general, religious development goes hand in hand with social organization. Those groups which, like the Rock Veddas of Ceylon (described by Sarasin) and the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego (described by Hyades and Deniker), have scarcely any clan organization, have also scarcely any religion. In most of the lowest communities known to us we find well-constituted clans and tribes, with strict (and usually complicated) laws of relationship and marriage, and a somewhat developed form of religion.[16] Here again it is evident that we see in the world only the later stages of a long social process; the antecedent history of this process belongs to sociological science, and does not concern us here;[17] its later history is inseparably connected with the development of religion.
[14]. It is in this social process that science, philosophy, art, and ethics are constructed, and these, though distinct from the religious sentiment, always blend with it into a unity of life. Religion proper is simply an attitude toward a Power; the nature and activity of the Power and the mode of approaching it are constructed by man's observation and reflection. The analysis of the external world and of man's body and mind, the discovery of natural laws, the history of the internal and external careers of the human race—this is the affair of science and philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through men's association with one another in society, their basis being certain primary instincts of self-assertion and sympathy; art is the product of the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by side and coalesce in unitary human life.
[15]. The external history of religion is the history of the process by which the religious sentiment has attached itself to the various conceptions formed by man's experience: ritual is the religious application of the code of social manners; the gods reflect human character; churches follow the methods of social organization; monotheism springs from the sense of the physical and moral unity of the world. Ideas concerning the nature and functions of the deity, the nature of the soul and of conscience, and future life are all products of scientific thought and might exist if religion did not exist, that is, if men did not recognize any practical relations between themselves and the deity. But, as a matter of fact, the religious sentiment, coexisting with these ideas, has always entered into alliance with them, creating nothing, but appropriating everything. Supernatural sanctions and emotional coloring are products of general experience and feeling. The intellectual and ethical content of religion varies with the intellectual and ethical culture of its adherents; we may speak properly of the philosophy and morals, not of a religion, but of the people who profess it.
[16]. The internal history of religion is the history of individual religious emotional experience (a phenomenon that hardly appears at all in the records of early life), and becomes especially interesting only in periods of advanced culture. It is true that this experience is based on the whole reflective life of man, whose beginnings go back to the earliest times. Aspirations and ideals, connected especially with man's religious life, spring from the long line of experiences with which men have always been struggling. The central fact of the higher religious experience is communion and union with the deity, and the roots of this conception are found in all the religious ideas and usages that have been formulated and practiced in human history. The study of such ideas and practices is thus important for the understanding of the later more refined spiritual life, as in turn this latter throws light on its crude predecessors. It is no disparagement to the higher forms of thought that they have grown from feeble beginnings, and it does not detract from the historical value of primitive life that we must decline to credit it with depth and refinement. Every phase and every stadium of human experience has its value, and the higher stages must be estimated by what they are in themselves. In the history of religion the outward and the inward elements have stood side by side in a unitary experience. But, though the deeper feeling is necessarily more or less closely connected with the external history, it is an independent fact requiring a separate treatment, and will be only occasionally referred to in the present volume.